


Mind-rules, mind-touch

by lynndyre



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-24 13:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4920808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The being closest to understanding Spock's needs is himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mind-rules, mind-touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lah_mrh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lah_mrh/gifts).



It is months into the Enterprise's 5-year mission when Spock's coping mechanisms fail. 

It is not a dangerous mission. The landing party, consisting of Spock himself, Captain Kirk, and Ensigns Jacobs and Freil, have made contact with an ambassadorial party of Nenyurian delegates to discuss trade agreements with the Federation. 

Spock meets the Nenyurian leader's eyes, and realizes the searching of her gaze is literal. Telepathic. He allows it. Her intent is not malicious. Only cautious. Assessing. Nonetheless it is a dizzy invasion as she sifts through his thoughts, seeking to know whether the Enterprise crew, the Federation, can be trusted. Looking for the darkest areas of his mind.

There was a time when Spock would have claimed to know his own darkness. But since first departing Vulcan, self-reflection has been an unpleasant task, easily set aside while there is more immediate work to be pursued. In the wake of Vulcan's destruction, there has always been an abundance of work.

And so the Nenyurian's gaze reaches into him, into that darkest heart, into the mind-scream of his planet's death and sets it echoing, as loud as that first impact. Louder, in seeming, without the press of danger to distract him. It is a single sound, and a billion, billion voices. Vulcan voices, desperate and searching. Animal shrieks, telepathic even without sentience, image-sendings of fear and incomprehension. The shattering of crystal and souls alike in the death-cry of the Hall of Ancient Thought, as the katra of all of Vulcan's remembered history die along with the living.

There is nothing to drown it out. Anger dies in desolation and impotence. Unprepared, the grief he has long denied sweeps over him like an ocean, like a shifting dune, and he is pulled under.

For a long time, Spock remembers nothing else.

He is lost. 

Something comes. Someone is with him. 

They touch Spock's inner-self, gentle, urging. They remind him he has a shape, that his mind has structure. That that structure is within his control. Spock remembers the mind-rules. They are methodical. Easy to follow, to rebuild. The other in his mind presses gently on these new walls, and commends him. He curls against them, basking in that sense of approval. 

Wake, he is urged.

Wake, he does..

The physicality of coming back to himself is unpleasant. This was not a healing trance, and every muscle tells him so. His limbs shake when the healer tests them, small tremors sparking at random along his arm, his thigh, his fingers. He drinks the vitamin solution provided, knowing his body needs the nutrients, but the tremors are not confined to skeletal muscle. His heartbeat thumps jarringly in his side, and he can feel its pulsing against his stomach.

Spock breathes through it, and asks about the mission. He is gratified to learn that it succeeded, and that the Nenyarian ambassador sent her apologies.

He is told that Starfleet willingly authorised the Enterprise to deviate from its assigned course to take him to New Vulcan, and will return within two solar weeks to retrieve him. It is a special treatment he both resents and appreciates, and he sublimates both into the knowledge that for Starfleet, it is logical to preserve the lives of all those Vulcans who survived.

He learns that the healers recommended he be aided by contact with close minds; family or trusted friends, if such remained to him. Sarek was off-world, on Terra, and would be required on Andor before he could return to New Vulcan. He learns it was Jim Kirk who told them to contact Elder Selek – told them if anyone could help Spock, he could.

Selek. It was, after all, very easy to fabricate an identity when so much data had been erased. Spock meets the eyes of his counterpart, whom he has spoken with only once. The older Spock inclines his head.

Spock appreciates Kirk's intervention. T'Pau was among the Elders who escaped the planet's destruction, and related by blood, but Spock would not have welcomed her touch in his mind. He is surprised to have welcomed himself.

The healer takes her leave, and they are alone.

"Would physical contact be welcome?"

"I am not a child." Had this other known the churning need that had filled his childhood, the buried, hated, craving for his father's shielding telepathic touch and his mother's safe arms, not doled out sparingly and separate, but both at once? 

....Yet if the other was himself, it was possible he had.

"...I would be grateful for your indulgence."

The older Spock inclines his head. Does not smile, but Spock feels it nonetheless. "I would be pleased to help us both."

The first, sharp realisation is that of warmth. Spock has been embraced before, by Amanda in his youth, by a scant few lovers in his university years, but their arms had been cool, their bodies alien to his own. This- surely, when he was young enough, he must have been held by his father, by his relatives or carers. But that is further than he can recall, and this is-  
immediacy  
warmthtouchtrust  
fulfillmentofneed

He reaches out himself, and is pleased to find his own touch comforts in turn.

For a long time, they drift. It is not like the blankness from which Selek rescued him, it is not empty. It is ...healing. Even of hurts Spock would not have admitted to having.

He remembers meditating as a child, small legs folded, reaching for the soul of the Universe. Mother's voice, you're telling me you can teach our son to feel God? Mother. Mother is gone. Vulcan is gone.

Examine it. Let it pass.  
But Spock is not alone. There is the other mind, beside and within him. And he remembers that lesson. Can they?

They reach.

And then, outside them both, there is the Other. A'Tha, awareness of that-which-created-- it is still there. It is constant.

It matters that things remain.

They are not the same, in their minds. Spock knows himself to burn, angry, like the sand, spun into storms by the hot wind. His older other feels like water, warmly adaptive. But even as Spock wonders if his counterpart is become more human, and he more Vulcan, he feels the currents of that warm sea-mind swim against him, and there are great shapes out of reach, thought-constructs deep as the Underliers. His discipline is as secure as a kolinahru, but emotion is woven through it, synergistic in it's strength.

Little wonder that even in extremis, Spock was willing to trust him. His other is as Vulcan as Spock himself. Perhaps he is moreso. 

He offers Spock a moment of memory, the genesis of that mindscape, a night when Delta Vega – T'Khut – rode high and heavy in the sky, and he had walked out in the sand. In the memory, his body is both younger and older than it is now. He is seeking something. He is found by something else. The desert remains still except where it rises, glittering in T'Khut's light. An Underlier. An a'kweth has sought him out. He stands before it, as the sand twists with its movement, and it reaches towards him. 

The memory draws away.

Grief-anger bursts again like bubbles, for all they have lost. Not only the people, though that is incalculable and unending. But the a'kweth lived beneath the sands, silicon-tentacled hidden ones, surfacing rarely enough that even Vulcan's Science Academy had not yet obtained more than glimpses of their lives, in moments of telepathic contact with those who met them. Now nothing more would ever be known, and all the hidden ones had perished beneath the crush of rock and sand.

His older self's pain echoes back, shaded with the memory of a bright, fascinating mind-touch, the shining back of the a'kweth under reflected light, and a voice like the movement of stone.

The other has lost more than Spock himself. Vulcan is lost to them both, but he has lost a universe; all that made his past, and all chance of the future being the same.

Spock does not desire to live his other-self's life. But it was a good life. 

Perhaps Spock will achieve a better one.

There is potential for restoration. Many Vulcan plants exist in gardens and laboratories throughout the federation, some have been seeded to colony worlds before. Specimens of animal life are harder to source. A few selaht survive, devoted pets who had followed their owners off-world. A litter of black-market le'matya kittens have been siezed from Orion traders, and they learn now to hunt small prey on their new world. Many species survive as genetic samplings in Starfleet libraries, or scientific institutions..

It does not stop the anger, but it is something.

They will change, but they will also remember. Preserve. Endure. Create new.

And live.

 

Ten days later, Spock beams up from the surface of New Vulcan, feels the desert heat dissolve around him and be replaced by cool, human-smelling shipboard air. Jim Kirk is waiting in front of the transporter platform, with a grin that only gets wider as Spock steps down onto the deck.

"Spock! Good to have you back."

His hands are behind his back, which Spock knows is less correct posture than an attempt not to reach out and make physical contact. It is enough to convince him to make the gesture himself, gripping Kirk's upper arm, and feeling the wash of happiness and excitement through his uniform shirt, human-cool and bright as morning sunlight.

"It is good to be back, Captain."


End file.
